


the path was closed

by dellaluce



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2010-08-05
Updated: 2010-08-05
Packaged: 2017-10-10 23:04:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/105385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dellaluce/pseuds/dellaluce
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world is falling apart at the seams, and he has this sinking feeling that it's all their fault. [persona 3/homestuck crossover]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. august 29, 2012

_wouldn't it be better this way?_

_ **August 29, 2012**   
_

The dreams don't happen often, but enough that John's always a little unsettled when he turns in for the night, and it's been that way since he was little. It's nothing he can put his finger on, really. Some people don't like spiders, some people don't like water. John doesn't like sleeping. One reason is as good as any.

When he dreams, it's of bullets and blue velvet, a story in words he doesn't know yet, a woman's voice singing elegant and sweet all the notes he's ever hummed alone in his bedroom. He dreams of butterflies, of faces and names and rumors, purpose in the dark and promises he hasn't made. He dreams of heavy curtains and a night club stage. He dreams of elevators and limousines, whispers of light and fog and the numbing vibration of motion without meaning. He thinks he might have been here before, when he was still wearing red glasses and spiderwebs. When black and ageless eyes gut him open, it feels like freedom, like draining a blister, and out pours a hundred people he isn't.  _ was. could have been. might yet be _ . There's no room in the person he is now for yellow coats and headphones, for aviators and knitting needles.

He dreams of silver screen flashes of the end of the world; he dreams of blood and blonde hair, of hollow victory and an ultimatum better than he could've hoped for. When he steps out of those halls of gossamer blue, he'll forget, as he must always forget, because he cannot do anything but honor his own solemn word. It's what she'd liked most about him, he remembers, until he remembers that it's a sin.

John wakes before the rest of the world to the yellow cast of sodium vapor lamps and a headache that throbs in the base of his skull. And like fillings picking up the tinny murmur of radio signals, he hears something else, too--it might be a voice, in the way it runs through the valleys and mountains of pitch, or it might be the random scatter of sound clinked out by windchimes in a storm. There's something in it that makes him a little nostalgic and he doesn't know why.

It's too early and he already feels like he's halfway through a marathon, but he won't go back to sleep. It's always the same, on these days: he lays out his clothes, brushes his teeth, showers until the water goes cold, and waits until he smells his father cooking breakfast. He hums in the shower today, the same song he's been humming since forever, and thinks about committing it to paper after he's dried his hair. He works on leftover biology homework instead.

By the time it's 6 and his alarm cranks out its grating digital protest, he's already shutting his textbook and scratching the back of his neck, awake for hours. The headache--that feeling of something trying to burst out--is gone, along with the low buzz that likes to sit somewhere behind his eyes. The sense of loss is inexplicable. He should be glad he didn't need to take anything for it, like he sometimes has to.

It was probably nothing anyway, John figures, like it always is. The dead morning hours do funny things to his head.


	2. october 29, 2003

_it'll never be the same._

_ **october 29, 2003.** _

John is seven when he learns that the dead morning hours do funny things to everyone. In the years that follow, he tries to explain it to people, and it never goes anywhere; just a lot of  _ yes, people act strangely when they don't get enough sleep,  _ and  _ bluh bluh chronobiology,  _ and he mutters “nevermind, thanks” somewhere around  _ circadian rhythms _ . And when a wikipedia scientist of a school counselor isn't rationalizing it into neat little color-coded boxes, it's his teachers sticking grades on it-- _ you have such a wonderful imagination, John.  _ It seems like a disservice to slap an A- on his psychological trauma and tack it up on his refrigerator. And when he mentions that yes, it actually is real, crawling, life-shaping psychological trauma, a few of them give him scrunched, concerned looks and ask what his home life is like.

But it's nothing like that.

It starts out as a fit of passive adolescent rebellion against his father's well-intentioned but velvet-gloved book of rules. (Homework done by 6, no eating after 7, TV off at 9:30, teeth brushed by 9:45, bed at 10, and he's  _ so sure _ that it's all the work of an honest to god unfeeling tyrant .) He lies in bed and listens to the rain on the roof, waits for his father's footsteps to settle, and fifteen minutes after  _ that _ , he slips out with a squirreled-away candy bar in hand, padding like a cat burglar down to the living room. He even feels a little thrill of victory when he makes it down the staircase without a squeak.

Three out of five rules is a pretty good record too, he thinks. It's four, really, when he realizes that the candy bar will effectively undo the two minutes of minty, joyless scrubbing he'll never get back. Four out of five.  It's just about the coolest thing he's ever done in his short seven years.

The VCR pulses 12:00, but the clock on the mantel says 10:37, so he takes a second to set the green numbers straight because his dad always promises he'll get around to it and he never does _ .  _ The world is his, after that; he clicks the TV on, bathes the living room with blue, and decides on an old favorite he hasn't seen in awhile. One rife with mobsters, car chases, jetpacks, gunfights, and Nazis--basically the perfect movie if he's ever seen one. He turns the volume down low, settling close to hear it over the patter of rain at the windows. (He brings the tally up to five out of  _ six _ , now;  _ don't sit too close to the TV _ , the mantra of years and years.) By 11:59, fingers sticky with chocolate and hair poking at odd angles from all the static, he's fairly sure he wants to be Cliff Secord when he grows up, and doctor can be a fallback profession in case he can't get the right helmet.

The VCR clock reads 12:00 again just briefly, just for one infinitesimal moment, before the world ends.

The way John's attention snaps is almost violent as the TV blinks out with an electrical whine. Perfect time for a power outage, he thinks, right at the awesome zeppelin scene, and it's more than a little bit unfair to have it happen on this night of all nights. It wasn't the neighborhood, either, probably just his house _ ;  _ the room's still lit a queasy, washed out yellow-green from the street lamps, rain-trails making slithering shadow puppets on the far wall.

He walks to the window, presses a hand to the pane, then a cheek as he strains his eyes up and down the street, and that's when he knows something is Wrong--not checkmarked spelling test wrong, but a Wrong that makes the small hairs on his neck stand up, the gut-filling feeling of breaking all the rules without the ride-along pride. The glass feels warm _ _ against his skin like the after-heat of a seat just vacated, and it  _ shouldn't,  _ not in a chilly, late October thunderstorm. The rain too is  _ Wrong _ in this light, and the street glistens with a thick nailpolish coat of it. As his eyes adjust, he watches the glossed surface melt into a deep, dirty red like the wine his father buys for Christmas.

The lamps are out for as far as he can squint; the glow is from the moon, jaundiced and grinning through a break in the clouds. He looks for signs of life and sees nothing but stark silhouettes cut against the hazy, chlorine-green backlight, and it's all  _ Wrong _ . When he sees movement, he thinks it might be a neighbor or a stray until the shadows on his lawn start shifting like liquid pitch, formless and  _ alive _ and  _ the world is sick _ , he thinks with a gasp, pulling away from the window.  _ The world is sick and it's bleeding and there's something out there, something wrong, something Wrong, something making it sick, something hurting it _ \--

John stumbles into backpedaling with fear rising in his chest, small fists clenched, until his calves hit the staircase and he has nowhere to go but up. Propelled by adrenaline, he takes them two at a time ( _ six out of seven, you'll hurt yourself _ ), bolting across the mezzanine and down the hallway to his father's room. Someone has to know that the world is dissolving into darkness; someone has to flatten John's hair and rub his back and tell him it's going to be fine. This has to be like it is in the movies, where Right trumps Wrong and the sun rises after all. He cannot conceive of a different ending.

A frantic explanation forms on his lips as he bursts into the room, then dies as quickly as it came, leaving him gaping, wide-eyed, and locked with fear.

His father's bed lists dangerously to one side, mattress heavy with the glint of something polished and piano-black, hidden under a curled, half-formed mess of shadows working at the lid with calm serial killer diligence. The sound is like a slow motion car crash--metal shrieking as it's shredded under sets of boline claws, undertones of groaning with each tug on the open gashes. John's breath hitches, hand frozen on the doorknob, as a pair of stoplight red eyes blink onto him; then two pairs, then three, and then the room falls into silence below the slippery shuffle of demons dropping off and moving in for a kill.

For years and years afterward, he'll know it as the last memory of the night he can recall in vivid clarity: three heads bobbing in a jerky marionette rhythm, six arms punching out from a single amorphous torso, and the chill of foreign, dark thoughts that seem all too human.

It's almost a blessing when reality splinters into screaming, red-hot pain _ . _

A voice floods his head like fire-- _ consumes it _ , burning into all the crenellations until there's no sight but fragments of white light, no sound but the roar of wind and storm, and no feeling but the shuddering agony of burning, of dying, like amputation and no anesthesia. The voice says words he'll never remember in a way he'll never forget, all snake-smooth and laughing.

_I'll take it from here, kid._

His father finds him the next morning sprawled out in the hallway, dried blood gathered at his ears, and rushes him into the hospital. It's the start of a three day visit, dotted with a parade tests and examinations, an uncomfortable acquaintance with the inside of an MRI scanner, a doting nurse who ruffles his hair and sneaks him ice cream when his father isn't looking, and a whole lot of television. John's threshold for boredom and fussing adults reaches its peak conveniently the day he's discharged, and by the time he's walking out to the parking lot with his dad, it doesn't even matter anymore.

“Clean bill of health,” his father says, clapping a hand on John's shoulder. “The doctor said the confusion should wear off--”

“Dad, I'm not confused,” he protests. “That's really what happened.” He's too short to see his father's shifting grimace, hidden under the brim of a hat.

“Still, you need some time to recover. You'll be fine.”

After a week, then two, then a month, though, it's clear that John isn't fine by its standard definition; the story never changes, the same pitch perfect repetition of detail with every retelling. His father never shows his worry, but it's apparent in the way he starts doting, making up for things he hasn't even done. John appreciates the gestures until he finds out he's been set up for sessions with the school counselor. He starts avoiding his father, after that.

Years pass. The story never changes. He's still terrified of approaching midnight, still hates storms, still can't stand walking outside after dark; dreams come and go where nothing's ever clear, waking with headaches and a voice he can't remember. He sees a therapist for his dad's sake, but he can never get too comfortable when he feels like it should be someone else sitting in the chair across from him. Time marches onward and the memories fade to a dull but persistent ache.

On his thirteenth birthday, he catches the VCR clock by chance as he's walking through the living room, backpack slung over his shoulder and afternoon sun in his eyes. It blinks insistently at him over and over,  _ 12:00, 12:00, 12:00 _ , like it's willing him, _ urging _ him, to revisit five years and a lifetime ago. It's not the first time the clock's reset since that night, but his father had been almost terrifyingly on the ball when it came to setting it right again, painfully aware of the significance. John isn't actually sure when he saw those numbers last.

He makes a decision. The story hasn't changed, and it won't, not ever, because John isn't a liar, not to himself or anyone else. And if he's not a liar, then it means it was real, that there's a notch in time where reality bleeds and everyone plays dead for all the right reasons; that the world is sick, that something's hurting it, that something's Wrong.

The prospect of being Cliff Secord went out the window when he hit double digits, helmet or no, but doctor is still on the table, and if the world is sick, then it  _ needs  _ one. Doctors, John thinks, can't be scared of a little blood and plague. They'd never be able to do their jobs.

He checks his watch, sets the clock to 4:13, and resolves that it won't be the last time he sees  _ 12:00, 12:00, 12:00. _


End file.
